The present invention relates to a distributed system, and more specifically to obtaining insights from a distributed system for a dynamic, customized, context sensitive help system.
When a user, who may be a professional who uses the distributed system or a user who is responsible for the development and/or maintenance, is working with documents that describe components, elements or entities used in a complex and distributed environment, it is time consuming to obtain configuration values and the state of the complex and distributed environment.
For example, an IT engineer may refer to a troubleshooting document that describes the problem and a solution, in which the document uses placeholders like [INSTALL_DIR], <JAVA_HOME>, and $DBINST in its description. The IT engineer must remember or determine the state/values for the 100's or 1000's of systems that they work on, on a daily basis. Furthermore they must map the placeholder to a corresponding value of the complex and distributed environment.
In another example, while referring to a software deployment guide, a deployment engineer may not have access to the configuration, risk, compliance, etc of the complex and distributed environment due to security, business constraints and/or network constraints. The deployment guide may therefore, only be useful if placeholders are accessible and available in the context of the complex and distributed environment.
In yet another example, while referring to a runbook, a system administrator may have to compute settings based on a current state of the complex and distributed environment, relying strictly on the system administrator being able to apply the formula, guidelines and rules to compute the correct configuration values while referring to documents that describe the components, elements and/or entities used in the complex and distributed environment.
In all of the above examples, it is time consuming for the user to get the actual values of the placeholders from the complex and distributed environment. Furthermore, manually extracting the placeholders is error prone and may not always be available to the user due to certain constraints. Additionally, multiple rules and guidelines need to be taken into account in order to determine the actual configuration of the complex and distributed environment, which can be time consuming.